25mm MDF 17th/18th Century Farmhouse complex

I've been building and painting up another 25mm building set from JohnBanks on ebay, for the very decent price of £35. I made a few alterations to make the building look more17th/18th century.

Here's how the Farmhouse set looks unpainted on ebay.

I want to use the buildings for both my Donnybrook period 1670's to late 1690's and for the Haitian Revolution, so I kept the paintjob to a pretty generic dirty white.

I blocked in quite a few of the outside wall windows.

But obviously had to keep the back entrance to the farmhouse.

The gate was supposed to be fixed in place, but I made three removable gates.

One closed

One blown up

And one open.

There was an arch over the entrance, but thought it looked better without.

I'm not 100% satisfied with the ground in the yard. I used my normal basing method, but I think it may need more work. To be honest I was a bit scared if I slapped loads of polyfiller all over the base it would warp?

The corner stones and arches around the doors and windows are made from card as are the tiles on the roofs. All the walls were painted with a mixture of white emulsion, mixed with a handful of sand, just to give it a little texture. I then gave them all 2 washed of grey/black ink. The roofs were painted with brick red masonry paint, then washed with black, and various brown washes.

Not sure if I'll use the small building in the courtyard. It looks very cramped.

I think it looks better without?

25mm Donnybrook Buildings 1

 

More great MDF buildings from JB MDF Products

These 4 come as a set for the princely sum of £12.70!

The two I've finished here are the small House/shed and closed barn. Both on the left in the pic above.

The Closed barn, I've tried to give them a Tudor/ECW style, to make it pretty generic for all of my Donnybrook shenanigans, whether in England, Ireland, Scotland or Flanders. 

The small House/shed, again with wooden beams, which are actually strips of card. I paid extra for the roofing material, which is made from coconut fibre and generally used to line baskets for flowers.

Two pics of the inside, again like the last post, I've left the inside unpainted and again, I may paint it white or may not......

I'm aiming for around 12 various buildings but I can never keep to any plan, so I may end up with loads more!

Oh well......

Haitian Revolution - 25mm MDF Buildings

Since the end of the Challenge back in March, I've been trying to get some buildings made for my Donnybrook excursion and also for the Haitian Revolution. I did initially want to scratch build some after watching countless hours of "How to" videos on You Tube,  but as a start I thought it best to buy some MDF buildings. I found a guy on ebay John Banks, who makes an extensive range of MDF buildings in all sizes from 6mm to 28mm, all being very cheap. Sounded good to me!

4Ground do a great Pirate Cove set, basically a Caribbean port, which to me fits in perfectly with how Haiti or Saint- Domingue as it was known would have looked like. They make a set of small Port buildings and when I saw these 28mm Garden Sheds, I had to have them and for only £5.50 for the three of them!!

They fit together pretty easy and I kept the decoration pretty basic. The middle building was covered in a thin coating of polyfilla and painted white. The other two, I threw in a handful of sand to a mix of grey emulsion paint and slapped it all over. Easy!

I haven't yet as you can see painted the inside of the building and may not bother. The roof was made from some corrugated card cut into tiles and glued on with PVA. I was stuck with how to paint them as I only had a small amount of Vallejo Cavalry Brown, so I used the next best thing, I've got a big tin of Red Masonry paint after decorating the front of my house during lockdown. So I used that, I've got enough to last a lifetime!

So there we have them, the first of my buildings for Saint-Domigue!

How to build No1 - FIW Indian Longhouses

After a lot of soul searching I finally worked out how I was going to make the first two of my Indian Longhouses, you'll not believe how easy they were to make. After seeing the final effect it's inspired me to make some more terrain pieces.
So now for the "How too"

1. A quick trip down my local timber merchant, £3 bought me an odd length of 3"x2" soft wood. I then cut one end at a slight angle, to represent the face of one of the longhouses.

2. I marked the same outline shape to both sides of the wood and at the apex of the roof.

3. This was the most time consuming part of the job, using a saw, a chisel, plane and a stanley knife, I cut out the shape, I kept the wood at this length because it was easier to use the plane, long smooth strokes (cough!), rather than short jerky strokes.

 4. I then cut the Longhouses to the length I wanted, I had hoped to get three houses out of the length of wood, but it would have made them too short, so I settled for two.

 5. For the massive sum of 49p I bought a years supply of brown crepe paper to use for the bark effect. I then cut out tons of different sized squares and stuck them onto the wooden blocks using PVA  wood glue, starting at the bottom and overlapping slightly with the next row.

 6. This only took around an hour to do, and looked quite effective.

 7. Over the last couple of months during walks in my local country park, (and at work, Fran!), I'd been collecting fallen twigs, I don't know the trees they came from, most must have been lying around for a while because they were very dry and brittle, but that's exactly how I wanted them. So after finding several lengths that looked to be around the same thickness, I cut them to size and glued them on with superglue, this turned out to be a little tricky as some of the twigs were not straight, (obviously!) so I glued them on there flattest side, which added to the effect, as they were then random looking.

 8. Then with the same sized twigs I cut the uprights, these again were a little tricky, after glueing my fingers together and to the model I decided to hold them in place with the tip of my knife until they dried.

 9. With a smaller sized length of wood I cut and glued in the cross struts.

10. I just repeated the procedure to complete the second longhouse. Then using a thin piece of MDF I cut out the two bases and glued them in place with PVA glue.

11. I then pinched some of Fran's Green stuff and made the two curtains, for the doors.

12. After seeing pictures of a porch like structure on some of the longhouses online, I made one for one of mine just to make it look different, I just used the same kind of procedure as before. In this picture the porch looks to be a different colour, but it's not the case, just a little camera trick!

13. The scalp post was just as easy, the only difference was that I added some cotton, to look like binding. The scalps were once again Fran's pinched Greenstuff.

14. The building were painted in an undercoat of GW black, then painted all over with Miniature Paint No82 Earth Brown, followed by a heavy drybrush of Vallejo 821 German Camo Beige, lastly another light drybrush of Vallejo 819 Iraqi Sand to highlight. The base was covered with PVA glue with sieved sharpe sand sprinkled on, with a few of the bigger stones left in. Then the base was dry brushed with Vallejo 976 Buff to highlight, lastly static grass was added for effect.
So there you go........
Ray